


Deluge

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ambiguously Canon Compliant, Angst, CC-2224 | Cody Needs a Hug, Episode: s01e20 Innocents of Ryloth, Hurt Obi-Wan, Identity Issues, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kadavo (Star Wars), M/M, Morality of Clones Discussed, Mutual Pining, Pining, Sexual Content, So much angst, This is very difficult to tag, Umbara (Star Wars), codywan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:35:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24767056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: He is a clone, not a man. Such ideas--such dreams--were things for men.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 10
Kudos: 349





	Deluge

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, folks! 
> 
> Tonally, this is very different from my other Codywan story; I really enjoyed writing it!
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy! Please R and R, let me know what you think :)

_Catch me, please._ You’re not falling. _But I am_. _Can’t you see it?_ You’re a Jedi.

He’s the best shot in his unit with a rifle. Easily. The best at hand to hand combat. The best at strategic design. He’s told that over and over and over again until it’s drilled into him. He doesn’t think himself better, but he’s aware of the expectation.

Cody. He’s not sure where the name comes from originally, but it sticks to him like the dragonfly paper near the exits of the training base. Soon enough, he’s Cody and CC-2224. He can’t forget the CC-2224; it lingers near the back of his mind the same way that a bit of music does. It’s the only music he’s heard from a mouth that didn’t sound identical to his own; something about women and cornfields. He doesn’t even like it, but it sticks to him the same way Cody does and he finds himself humming it at odd hours when he’s supposed to be sleeping.

He learns more music. Bawdy songs mostly, from the clones who are trained for the pilot corp and have access to everything the galaxy has to offer. He doesn’t like them much. Stoic Cody; he likes a good joke, but only a good one. His little tune sticks with him. He sleeps at night with his hands folded over his chest, eyes fixed on the white plastic tube that surrounds him, surrounds all of them that has no shape in the darkness. And when he dreams, he tries to imagine what a cornfield looks like. He wonders too, if he will ever see one or if they are something reserved for important beings. They must be, he thinks, for them to put them in a song like that.

_I know_. And I’m a clone. _I know._ I’m designed, built, constructed. I’m not human.

His general is a human man named Obi-Wan. Cody has only met one man in his life and telling Jango Fett apart from his brothers that were masquerading as men was nearly impossible unless he was standing alongside the Kaminoans. This man is very different.

He looks different. He’s slightly built, as if a strong breeze might blow him over. In fact, as Cody stands beside him on a balcony, surveying a battlefield, he thinks that exact scenario might happen as the wind buffs them from all sides. It blows his long hair all around him. It’s ginger: A word that Cody has learned since they’ve met, very different from Cody’s own tightly kept black curls. It’s shiny like cleaned metal, at least at the beginning of a battle, and lets Cody pick him out from klicks away on a crowded battlefield even though he’s wearing armor that matches the his soldiers (though bits and pieces are starting to be shed—the helmet was the first to go). The wind whips his hair across his face and cover the ends of his goggles and whatever he’s looking at and Cody wants to reach out and brace him against the wind.

But then he’s leaping, jumping so high into the air that for a moment, he disappears as a blot against the sun above his head. And then he’s spinning in a graceful arc. And what Cody thinks was simply a move to show off his supposed Jedi ability lands him between a squadron of droids and one of Cody’s brothers, moments from being blown to pieces as a leg injury slowed him down. And then droids are bits of added rubble on the battlefield and his brother is leaning on the Jedi for support, the blue blade swinging in a wide arc as they make their way to the medical station, away from the thick of the fighting.

And Cody swings his rifle to his arm, taking out two droids in as many shots to give them added cover. And he feels something flutter in his chest, in his stomach, in the back part of his brain where he’s started to remember other songs or bits of phrases that he likes. Pieces of art that they’ve seen handing in the various towns and cities and palaces that they’ve encountered. A place in his mind for beautiful things.

_I don’t believe that._ It’s what we have always been told. _What do your own feelings say about it?_

Cody starts to meet other humans. Some of them are on the planets they travel to and Cody finds it odd that they react so strongly to the army all looking the same when so many of the people on these planets look so similar. There are whole cities, he feels, with the same blonde hair or the same gray eyes or the same dark brown skin. They stare at him when he gives orders to his men, but Cody has learned that the best place to talk is when his general is in the same room.

If Obi-Wan is there, it is undoubted that the attention of whatever village or city they are in will turn to him. If clones are one kind of anomaly, Jedi are another altogether. And people’s eyes fix on his general with a kind of fascination that Cody has never seen directed towards himself. Clones, it seems, lose their appeal after you’ve seen a few dozen of them together. Jedi; however, are a commodity.

He asks his general about it once, who tells him that the adults of the galaxy either loathe Jedi or want to sleep with them. Cody is thankful for his helmet that hides the red tint to his skin. He knows about sex and about all the machinations and bits that go with it. He’s heard some of his brothers whisper about it: About men and women and other beings that they’re attracted to; but he doesn’t think about it often. It seems a distraction from his work. Stoic Cody to the last. And besides, sex is for humans; for men; for beings. Not clones.

He can’t help his mind wandering though. If his general had ever taken advantage of that galaxy-wide interest. His dreams are disturbed by the image of faceless beings, all blending together into everything Cody thinks he is not. More than once he wakes angry, with a tightness coiled his chest that he doesn’t understand, that expands and retracts as though its alive and a part of him. It grows on those nights that his dreams are haunted by those faceless figures, it’s soothed when Obi-Wan puts his hand on Cody’s shoulder at one of their strategy meetings, paying him a compliment. In those moments, if it is still a coil in his chest, its radiating heat all through Cody’s body.

This goes against everything. _No, not everything._ What do you mean? _Love never goes against the force._

If Cody knew less about the Jedi Order, he would have thought that Anakin Skywalker was his General’s child. He doesn’t know much about children, but he knows that his understanding of age and growth and development is highly skewed. Humans, he comes to understand, don’t grow nearly as fast as growth-accelerated clones do.

The men respect General Kenobi. They admire him, know that he considers them to be of value. But they keep him at arm’s length, afraid of offending what Cody has learned are not delicate sensibilities. But the men like General Skywalker. He’s loud and rambunctious and apparently the correct amount of crazy for the men in Cody’s battalion to follow after him as though he might do something spectacular at any moment. Cody thinks that they don’t see the insecurities that Cody does, the questions that Skywalker has about his own mind, on display only in the command tent. Only to Obi-Wan.

He clings to Obi-Wan’s side at the same time that he pushes him away. Cody does not understand it, not until they have ventured across what feels like half the galaxy and his General’s hair is cut short and they’ve all been taken captive multiple times and liberated so many planets now that the reds and greens and blues that Cody can see as they land on all these odd places have started to blur into a middling brown in his head. That’s when he meets children for the first time, sees them interact with their parents. Long for affection and independence in the same breath and its in one of Skywalker’s dramatic exits from the command tent after an argument that Cody is able to see the same behavior in him.

It makes Cody wonder about family. For the most part, many of them seem the same. Little pockets of people with oddly similar features and strange bonds of affection. Cody has brothers, but in truth that are not his brothers at all. They are supposedly identical beings and none of the sets of brothers that Cody has met, no matter how similar they look, are anywhere as close to identical as clones. 

He has tried to work through that reasoning with himself before. It is clear that the term brother emerged out of convenience more than anything else, but he has to wonder how accurate it is. When he is with most Jedi or in the villages or cities they venture to, he feels as though he is identical to his brothers then, that he could be any clone, in any armor, on any battlefield in the Republic and it wouldn’t’ matter. But there are other times where he feels like Cody. The only Cody.

Most of them, he realizes, are when he is with his general. When they are side by side in battle or in command or when Obi-Wan is smiling at him as he hands his general back his dropped lightsaber for the fourth time in a campaign and apologizes for having Cody spend time on such things. In those moments, he feels like only himself and the fact that he might be identical to the men he calls brothers is not relevant; it’s only the slight flutter in his stomach and the slight racing of his heart that matter. He’s started to notice that he feels the same way around Skywalker, who never acts as though Cody is not there, who asks questions after old campaigns, after other members of the unit and claps Cody on the shoulder in a way that is similar, but more exuberant than Obi-Wan.

Like father, like son. Cody isn’t sure when he learned that phrase, but he lets it stick.

Love. _Love._ You love me? _I do. If you don’t love me; however, don’t think I can’t accept that decision._ Can you accept that I may not have the freedom to make that decision?

Skywalker stops coming around as often. He has a Shiny of his own, according to Obi-Wan and Cody tries to imagine that in his head. He meets Commander Tano eventually and he can envision the headaches this his general is going to have managing the pair of them. She is different around Obi-Wan than she is Skywalker, and Obi-Wan is different around her. Notably, rather than spending large portions of time looking over battle plans or pretending to while instead arguing about something else, they play a truly incredible amount of Sabacc.

Tano is good at it, far better at it than any of the members of Cody’s company who have acquired decks from backwaters across the galaxy, varying degrees of used. Obi-Wan is usually better. Usually.

But there are moments when she wins and he watches his general sink back into his chair with his head thrown back, half his hand yet to be played. She makes offhand comments of learning things from Master Plo and they’ll share a laugh at Skywalker’s expense when she repeats some story of testing it out on him first. When she does lose, Obi-Wan will teach her the new strategy and sometimes late at night, he’ll see it again as she defeats Boil who has a tendency to flip whatever flat surface they’re playing on.

Cody doesn’t quite watch them play. He does other things: Folds his undertunics and rolls his socks in neat bundles to capitalize on the space in his storage area. Reapplies the marigold yellow paint that has been adopted by the 212th for their armor and scrubs in tiny circles on his visor until both the dirt and streaks are gone completely. But he picks it up all the same when he’s listening.

And there start to be nights when Commander Tano is gone and Obi-Wan invites him to the table. Cody thinks its an exercise at first, something to allow for his general to think through their latest battle strategy. There are turns in their conversation that seem less than casual and contain bits of battlefield planning that Cody has to marvel that Obi-Wan noticed at all, but the rest is quite casual. Has Cody ever read this book series? Has he thought about life after the war? What does he think of the Jedi? What does he think about? Does he like the yellow paint on his armor? Does he think that Obi-Wan should paint his wrist guards to match the men’s?

They are easy conversations, punctuated with regular victories by Obi-Wan as Cody’s mind wanders to keep up with the questions and to formulate his own. Life in the temple, life before the war. He learns about Qui-Gon Jinn and a younger Skywalker and that it isn’t that Obi-Wan isn’t good at flying, it’s that Anakin is exceptional and Obi-Wan never cared for it anyway. He hears stories of odd characters across the galaxy and other beings that Cody has seen his general interact with flit through his mind: The small children who crowd around him with excited cheering, the backwater bounty hunters and assassins who seem as willing to talk to him as they do their usual clientele, the clones in their unit who hold him now in a sort of reverence as they becoming increasingly engrossed in the war effort.

Finally, Cody wins a hand, in the middle of learning the identity of one Dexter Jettser, a diner owner on Coruscant that led the general to finding the clone army on Kamino to begin with. Cody is listening to the story intently because there are pieces of it that are clearly nonsensical, but he isn’t so distracted by it that he misses the chance to win enough hands to play out his cards. And when he does, resting his fingertips on the edge of the table, he expects to see shock on his general’s face. That he’s been bested by a clone at this game that Cody has only just learned. But instead he laughs good-naturedly and sets the cards in a little pile on the end of the table, offering Cody a drink before its time for them to go to bed.

_It’s your life, Cody._ My life belongs to the Republic. It always has. _That isn’t true._ Yours does, too.

Cody realizes how long they have been together during the mission on Ryloth. When some of the Shinies are in awe of Obi-Wan’s abilities to manipulate the force. Cody does not understand all of the intricacies of the force, and he won’t deny that the scene playing out in front of him carries a sort of terrifying splendor, but it is nothing new. The 212th has a low casualty rate, one of the lowest in the war, but his brothers will cycle to other units as they pick up ranks or skills that are needed elsewhere. And, eventually, there are a crop of new, identical faces occupying the squadrons that Cody sets up instead of more familiar ones. These sort of these never fail to impress the new ones. 

It’s a strange realization, to realize that even with their armor on, when they are at their most alike, that he can tell them apart. The way Waxer walks too straight-backed when they march, how Boil touches the side of his helmet when he’s scanning through his helmet across a battlefield. He thinks it's only him that can tell the differences until he notices Obi-Wan covering a smile when one of the newer members of their unit almost sets a detonator off twice before clipping it to his belt. He tells Cody his name, mentions that he might be struggling a bit with uniform regulations and Cody can’t help the smile he returns. And it’s only half because the scene, now involving another of the soldiers, is becoming quite comical.

That interaction lingers with Cody though. And he notices now, pays attention like he hasn’t in the years prior, the way that his general never fails to address a clone by their chosen name in conversation. How he can spot who’s struggling from across the battlefield, and point them out to the medic team without needing the constant reminders that Cody knows are necessary for other Jedi. His unit doesn’t notice as much, they don’t know enough about how clones are acknowledged in other units to know better. To them, they have always been Waxer, Boil, Root, Wrecker; never 2298 or 2367. And Cody, he has been Cody so long that at times he forgets that he is actually CC-2224.

He’s starting to like Cody more and more. The clones under him call him Commander and his name has largely gone out of use. Only one person uses it regularly. He thinks for a moment that although his general says all clone names, but Cody thinks that when he says Cody it has just a hint of something different. Not exasperate affection like it does when he says Anakin or the paternalism when he says Ahsoka, but something else. Warmth maybe, that floods Cody all the way down to his bones.

He thinks he would hear it anywhere, no matter how thick the battle is raging around them or how far away his general might be. He hears that voice in his sleep, let’s the sound stick in the same place that his first song lingers and the same place where those private, beautiful moments he doesn’t think he is supposed to have all stay. The next time they meet a being on some far galaxy, eyeing his general with some clear intention, the coil of anger in his chest ignites, but that night, he thinks of his voice in a different way.

It’s soft, so delicate that in Cody’s dreams it seems to barely be there at all at first. And then, where there used to be faceless shapes, held against his general in the dark as they engaged in all manner of things, he sees himself instead. Pressed against his general, shedding armor and clothes and steel until its just them and that voice, saying his name over and over and over again is in his head. It’s yearning, keening.

Those dreams startle him awake in his cot or in his bedroll, conscious of the breathing of hundreds of clones on one side of the flap that leads into their main tent and the deep breathing or pacing or sleepless rustling of his general on the other. He stares at the tarp over his head after those dreams, and wills his body to relax, his heart to stop racing, his mind to stop telling him how right all of that seems.

He is a clone, not a man. Such ideas--such dreams--were things for men.

_I can leave the order, Cody. I would leave the Order, if you asked me to_. The Republic bought my life from the beginning to the end. They expect me to make good on that debt.

Cody decides that if he had to pick a way to die from natural causes, he’d chose the cold. He thinks that some of the others might disagree, that the faint blue shade of their lips and the creeping numbness that sinks beneath their armor is not preferable to dehydrating slowly on some tropical planet. In the cold, he feels almost weightless; it is impossible to focus on anything except the cold whereas in the heat, the hallucinations that it induces become those nightmares in real time. They burn with life in a way that Cody would never allow himself to give those thoughts, with a vibrancy that he doesn’t want to imagine is something he truly desires.

And so, when the heat on their small cruiser dies during an expeditionary force and the blizzards that are sweeping across whatever planet they’ve found themselves on is keeping help form arriving until morning, Cody thinks that he might deserve the death that seems to be coming. They manage to find a cave, thought the icicles that are frozen in a broad web to the ceiling do little to soothe the fears of the force that they will all die come morning. He sets his own signal at the mouth of the cave, near the taut string that they have put up to move between the abandoned speeder and the cave.

Supplies come in slow intervals: Bedrolls, rations, canteens of water, any scraps of warm clothing or waterproof covering they can find. One soldier comes dragging one of the foldable tables and Cody wants to yell at him for wasting a trip until he wedges it in the cave mouth and suddenly the biting wind that had been nearly unbearable is gone. After that, the unit is in much better spirits.

They eat the rations with little complaint, especially after a pair of them are able to coax some fluorescent lichen glowing from the back of the cave into a small fire on the floor for them gather around. It is nothing new for the clones to be in such close proximity and it occurs to Cody that they have perhaps slept in worse conditions that this. One planet with its incessant rains and bugs the size of Jedi starfighters comes to mind immediately. He doesn’t let the edge settle, even as the men set up an official communications station and the medic works on small patches of frostbite where skin was exposed for a brief interval too long outside. He stands, paces the rock floor in a semicircle around them until Waxer makes a joke about wind getting in through the hole that he is wearing through the floor.

Obi-Wan invites him over to the large rock where he has placed his own things. He has his holoprojector sitting on a rock, but he is pressed back against the rock wall, covered except for his eyes and cheeks by the thick, Republic-commissioned parkas that they are given for these missions and a pair of thick padded pants and gloves. He has eaten his rations, Cody notes, and next to him is a metal cup that is curling with thick bands of steam that are getting increasingly smaller as the seconds tick by.

Cody settles down next to him, leaning back on the wall that would probably be much colder if it wasn’t for his temperature control in his armor. They watch the men around the fire, occasionally Obi-Wan sips tea, and talks in a voice that gets quieter and quieter as the men start to settle in their bedrolls for the night, largely gathered in a loose pile near the fire. Cody wonders if that’s an indication that he should join them, but when he turns to ask, feels a weight press into his shoulder.

Obi-Wan is asleep, his voice having faded into only soft breathing as his head falls to Cody’s shoulder. The gentle knock doesn’t wake him, and Cody freezes for a long moment. He reaches out a hand and carefully slips what is left of the tea from his general’s hand, then settles back, as carefully as he can, to get some sleep of his own, Obi-Wan’s parka-padded temple pressing gently against him.

_You’re not an object._ No? _No. You’re a man. A living, breathing being. And I love you._ I love you, too.

He learns about what happened on Kadavo from two places: Skywalker and an accident. He has never heard Skywalker so angry in his life. Cody knows he isn’t force sensitive, but he thinks that even he can feel the pure rage radiating off of Skywalker as he sets off a barrage of screaming that is so loud the sound reverberates off of the ship’s hull. At first, Cody thinks he is yelling at his general, and goes to defend him, but then he realizes that while Obi-Wan is in the room, Skywalker’s anger is directed elsewhere. He doesn’t eavesdrop on the general’s business, but it is impossible not to hear him from his vantage point outside of the door.

Obi-Wan was taken captive. Beaten. Enslaved. A metal table, likely the one that Obi-Wan always has so carefully laid out with their battle plans, smashes into a wall and the sound radiates through Cody's eardrums. Obi-Wan was whipped. Burned. Tortured. And then Skywalker's voice shifts. He’s still yelling, but Cody can hear the break in his voice. Almost as if he’s crying. Begging. For Obi-Wan to go to the medic, for him to at least let Skywalker check on his wounds. For him to pass this mission on to another person—It’s only been two days since they returned.

Cody presses his forehead to the wall, thankful that he is the only one in the hallway outside Obi-Wan’s quarters. He can hear his general’s gentle rebuttal and the sound of Skywalker’s metal hand connecting with the wall of Obi-Wan’s cabin. He wants to open the door, to argue alongside Skywalker. To wash away the images in his mind at that moment, of Obi-Wan’s blood spraying out in a wide arc into the Zygerrian sand, of Captain Rex and Obi-Wan together being beaten by guards as they tried to save lives and complete their mission together. His own blood boils at the thought, and he thinks that anger is not a strong enough word for what he’s feeling.

That conversation permeates the whole of the mission they are, which, Cody does not fail to notice, is hardly up to their usual caliber of work. Its predominantly negotiation based, hardly even any clankers to speak of. The unit is fairly bored, doing little beyond routine walkarounds while Obi-Wan handles interactions with diplomats and negotiators who fail to meet his own standard. It’s over by the third day they are on planet, and Obi-Wan tells him to prepare for take off at dawn.

Cody is doing just that, preparing the men for leaving in the morning which at the very least keeps them occupied for a handful of hours, when he sees the evidence of what happened at Kadavo. Not on purpose, of course, but in making his report back to his general, he doesn’t knock before entering the cabin. It’s nothing extraordinary; Cody has seen glimpses of his general’s body before, particularly as a result of medical intervention, but nothing like this.

He’s turned away from Cody, finishing dressing as he’s watching a holo-message come through. His back is shredded.

There are long cuts from shoulder to hip, cutting diagonally across his body; there are smaller horizontal stripes that cut across the space between his shoulder blades and along the center of his spine. In the spaces between them, the skin burned red and swollen with infection and inflammation, bruises mottled along the skin in grotesque swirls of purple that matched the small, perfectly circular burns that has been pressed into the skin.

He couldn't stop the noise in his throat that gave away his presence, nor the reaction of his general that showed that the front of his body, though less cut, showed similar evidence of torture. Obi-Wan didn’t speak at first, waiting on Cody, but then said softly that he was sorry to alarm him. That it was nothing. Cody didn’t speak until he had opened the first aid supply drawer and pulled out a pack of bacta strips. He didn’t speak as he applied them to the cuts across Obi-Wan’s back; said nothing as heat rose in his face at this kind of contact. They had touched before, and not infrequently. But this...this was a level of intimacy that Cody had not found himself well acquainted with. 

When Obi-Wan gave a slight shiver at his touch, Cody felt the dryness that touched the back of his throat. Told himself that of course it was only the cool bacta, the soothing of the medication. It was nothing to do with him. With them.

_It sounds like this is what we both want._ What I’ve wanted has never mattered _. It does to me._

His general is different after Umbara. It is a subtle shift at first, Cody notices, brought on what Cody believes to have been a brief instant of panic that he had seen reflected in Obi-Wan’s eyes. It was a lower ranking clone reporting on what had happened. Clones murdered by other clones, Krell’s deception and intentional slaughter of the men in both companies. Waxer’s death. Others, too.

Cody watches him stiffen, already haggard from the exhaustion of marching seemingly endlessly on the capital city of Umbara, all for naught. Obi-Wan starts giving commands; body counts, medical supplies, repairs for the communication lines to the members of the 501st who are still waiting on instructions. But there is a harder edge there than Cody can hear.

And then Cody hears his own name. And he thinks about why; he had offered to lead one of those squadrons himself. Would have done it if Waxer hadn’t volunteered himself to allow Cody greater mobility at the base. He announces himself and knows then that he isn’t imagining the relief in his general’s face that is replaced far more slowly than Cody would think it would be. Almost as if he wanted Cody to know.

And then Obi-Wan’s hand is on his shoulder and there is so much sorrow in his voice that Cody is startled. Obi-Wan has never been cruel, never callous about loss of soldiers on the battlefield, but Cody didn’t realize he could feel this sort of loss so deeply. So personally.

Not for the first time, he wants to reach out to him. And do what, he wasn’t exactly sure. His thoughts were swept up in thoughts that he usually only entertained in the moments between sleeping and waking. It was a natural reaction to grief, he had heard, but he was thinking more of how it would feel to share this pain with someone who so obviously understood. Someone who was feeling as deeply as he was in that moment. Who was kind and gentle and strong and so radiant that Cody felt almost blinded looking too closely at him. He wants to reach out to Obi-Wan. With his body, with his words, with everything. He was so close. He wants to close to small gap between them and press his lips to Obi-Wan’s until the frown that has creased his features is gone in some sort of blissful oblivion.

Then, I want you. Now. Tomorrow. Forever. _I can give you all I have to give you now. And the rest when the war is over._

When Greivous destroys the flagship, Cody can’t help the slight thrill that courses through him as he sprints at Obi-Wan’s side through the corridor. That they share an escape pod as they watch what’s left of the ship go up in flames for their own doing. The gentle ribbing starts in the mess as soon as they’ve landed, poking fun at the way that his general’s hand lingered on Cody’s forearm as they observed their handiwork. It makes his blood boil, far more than it should, and he storms out without finishing the meal of something that once resembled food.

His ears are burning, but so are other parts of him—mind and body. He wonders what Obi-Wan is doing, likely meditating as he likes to do after dinner. Cody likes to observe those moments; despite not partaking in the mediation, they are peaceful and calming and Cody feels like they offer a few moments of clarity which he supposes is Obi-Wan’s defense of them.

Cody let’s his feet carry him to the command center, expecting solace and instead finding his general looking at everything, and therefore nothing, on the holoprojector. He smiles at Cody, who lets the warmth trill through him at that. He says he was hoping that Cody would come, and Cody thinks it’s to show him something on the screen or something valid, but instead, he pulls up two chairs and they sit in a kind of soft silence. Cody feels as though they are on the edge of something, something not able to be vocalized. Wishful thinking, he is sure, until Obi-Wan turns off the holoprojector.

He starts to talk about the Jedi Code. But not in the formal, detached way that Cody is used to the Jedi speaking and not in the proud way that many of them seem to flaunt it. It sounds, at least to Cody, almost mournful. No attachments, that’s what Cody has always known. That this was all little more than a desperate dream of an almost-man. And then Obi-Wan’s head is in his hands and he’s practically sliding to the floor. What would Cody have him do, he asks? Could he leave the order? What then? What about the war?

Cody doesn’t have answers. Only feelings that he realizes in all of the shared touches, the shared feelings, the shared perceptions, that his general harbors as well. What he wants most is there in front of him, being spun into existence by the man who Cody knows he is in love with. The man who loves Cody the same. But he’s speaking into existence too the barriers to that ever being anything more than a shared feeling.

When Cody leaves later, after they’ve sat in silence for what must have been a lifetime, Cody realizes it is likely for the best. Love is for men. And Cody, despite the hole in his lungs at that moment and the cracks that are threatening to tear his heart from his chest, has never been a man. Not to anyone that mattered.

That is all I’m asking for. _Then we’ll figure out the rest together._

When it finally breaks, it is not the deluge that Cody is expecting. He expected a rapid turn or twist, a sudden realization or change in circumstance that thrust them together and allowed them to overcome all of their obstacles in one smooth motion. He does not expect it to be in his general’s cabin on the Negotiator, leaving another haggard victory on another wayward planet.

He doesn’t expect to reach out and catch Obi-Wan’s face in his hand, curving it around his beard and jaw, noticing—not for the first time—the white hairs starting to form around on his temples. And then there are tears around the bottom rim of his general’s blue eyes, not dripping, not draining, simply watering there. And then he’s talking. And they’re talking. And it hurts, hurts so much to say what Cody is thinking. That he isn’t really Cody, that he’s CC-2224 and Obi-Wan is flesh and blood and beautiful and a being. A being.

But that doesn’t stop him. Doesn’t stop the flow of promises that slip from his lips. To give Cody everything he has. For a life after the war. A life together. No Jedi. No clones. Two men, two beings. Together.

And then Cody knows what Obi-Wan meant by falling. Because he’s falling. Not in love; he arrived there long before. Not simply back into the bed where they are shedding armor and clothes like water even though Cody knows very little of what they’re speeding towards. He’s free falling into the kind of blissful oblivion not meant for a clone. Or maybe—just maybe—it is.

It’s clumsy. He feels clumsy, absent of his usual battlefield grace and its more than once he thinks they should simply stop so that he can find sure footing. But the last thing he wants to do is stop. Stop feeling the soft warmth of his general’s mouth on his own, the scratch of his beard on Cody’s bare skin. The careful touches as he figures out what Cody likes. The feeling of Obi-Wan’s skin under his own fingers, the sound of his loud gasp when Cody caresses him like a real lover. He doesn’t want this to stop. And so, he doesn’t stop it.

He doesn’t stop it when all of their clothes are discarded and he’s lying on his back in his general’s bed, watching with fascination as Obi-Wan prepares himself, prepares them both for what’s coming next. He doesn’t stop it when Obi-Wan is taking him into his body and the feeling of him is enough to make Cody want to scream and to lose his voice at the same time. He doesn’t stop it when they are fully together, when Obi-Wan leans over him and Cody meets him halfway for a kiss before Obi-Wan starts moving.

Cody doesn’t know what this feels like for other beings. If it feels like pure heat and friction and such a completeness that Cody doesn’t want it to stop even though he’s well aware that he’s spiraling towards something. Something incredible that’s building in the pit of his stomach where all of those feelings had been sitting untapped for so long. The thoughts leave his mind as Obi-Wan groans at Cody’s hesitant touch that gains confidence as he increases his pace.

And then his hips are meeting Obi-Wan’s, and his moans are mingling with his. It’s feel good, so good. And right, so very right. It must for Obi-Wan too because even though Cody loses himself first in the feeling of Obi-Wan’s body, vision blurring white and body turning to jelly underneath his general, Obi-Wan spills onto Cody’s stomach moments later and collapses artfully onto the bed next to him panting hard.

Cody doesn’t know what to say, but has decided that it doesn’t matter in that moment. Maybe it will never matter again. That the promises they made before and during these past few moments will be enough to carry them through whatever may come. Maybe Obi-Wan feels the same, but eventually he does pull Cody from the bed to the shower in his cabin and kisses him again, pressed back against the wall. The beginning of the war, when he had just become Cody and the end of the war, where he might become something else entirely, both seem very far away.


End file.
